There are pivotal moments in our lives, like a soccer penalty shootout, a piano competition, or a final job interview, that determine the amount of compensation we receive later.
However, as the saying goes, “there is always a demon lurking in the Olympics,” and we humans are known to often perform at our worst at the “most crucial moments.”
This isn’t just coincidence, it ‘s also statistically proven that players’ success rates drop off in crucial moments, like basketball free throws near the end of a game.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the United States has previously been investigating how this deterioration in performance when faced with such enormous rewards occurs using the human-like brains of monkeys, and has now finally succeeded in elucidating the underlying brain mechanism.
How on earth could such a huge reward have led to such an unbelievable failure?
Humans aren’t the only ones who fail at important times. Making an unexpected mistake on the biggest stage.
What’s more, it wasn’t something simple like “not being able to perform to my full potential”; it happened in an area where I had never failed even once during practice.
Sadly, similar tragedies are occurring everywhere, from global stages like the Olympics and international competitions to school events.
On the other hand, historically, such tragedies have mainly been attributed to “mental weakness (mental problems)” in response to stress.
Some scientists also believe that such failures are uniquely human.
It was believed that failure at key moments was caused by strong mental disturbances that cancelled out the accumulated practice, and that only people with superior brains were capable of producing such mental disturbances.
However, if non-human animals also fail at the most critical moments, the cause may lie not in the mind but in the wiring of primitive brain circuits.
In fact, previous neuroscience research has shown that the brains of humans and animals respond to rewards and pleasure in extremely similar ways.
In a 2021 study, Carnegie Mellon University changed the amount of sugar water given to monkeys when they successfully completed a task to see how this affected their success rate.
The task was simple, as shown in the diagram above: touch a dot displayed on the screen and move it to a designated location. If successful, the player was given sugar water as a reward.
The results were interesting.
The monkeys’ performance improved as the amount of sugar water reward was doubled, tripled, and so on.
However, when presented with 10 times the amount of sugar water, the monkeys suddenly began to fail again and again.
For example, a monkey named Earl failed all 11 out of 11 chances despite being familiar with the task.
These results indicate that the “high-stakes” situation in which huge rewards were offered significantly hindered the performance of not only humans but also monkeys.
This makes me wonder what’s going on in the brain.
In the real world, failure is not because of the weakness of the mind.
This time, researchers at the university decided to insert electrodes into the brains of monkeys and analyze what happened in their brains when they performed the same experiment.
They found that individual cells in the monkey’s motor cortex were sensitive to the amount of reward, showing stronger signals when larger rewards were presented.
They also found that before the monkeys performed the task, a motor plan was already constructed in their brains.
Motor planning is a neural pattern that is assembled in the brain prior to a specific movement and is thought to be essential for facilitating behavior.
In fact, when comparing the monkeys’ task performance and the strength of their motor planning, the neural patterns of the motor planning became stronger as the reward increased from “small” to “medium” to “large.”
However, when a huge reward was presented, the neural patterns for motor planning were found to be impaired.
These results imply that although an increase in reward signals strengthens motor planning, an enormous reward can have a negative effect on motor planning and cause it to collapse.
They also analyzed how monkeys who were offered too much reward failed the task, revealing an interesting fact.
There are two ways a task can fail: either passing the target point or not reaching the target point. However, when a huge reward was offered, we found that almost all failures were due to time running out, meaning the target point was not reached.
The results suggest that a breakdown in motor planning may be causing the monkeys to lose momentum in their movements, resulting in a type of motor atrophy.
This study shows that failure at the “most critical moments” is not a problem of the higher mind that is unique to humans, but rather a problem with the wiring of brain circuits, where motor planning breaks down when exposed to enormous rewards.
Research has shown that the condition under which this problem occurs in the brain is when a reward that is too large occurs very rarely, which in humans would be a large tournament, music competition, or judging where one’s self-worth is measured.
By identifying the area of the brain where problems occur in the motor circuits involved in high-stress situations, it may be possible in the future to develop medication that prevents people from making mistakes during real-life situations under high pressure.
If these drugs were not treated as doping, we might be able to avoid tragic incidents where athletes are unable to demonstrate the results of their training in the actual competition.